The Equity Fund

To launch the project, we began with stakeholder interviews to uncover key goals and challenges Equity Fund aimed to address. To refine their approach, messaging, and visual identity, we facilitated a series of collaborative workshops focusing on brand messaging, visual territories, and site structure.

I led the visual territories workshop, leveraging are.na as a tool to collect and organize visual inspiration. Collaborating with a team member, we curated this inspiration into a personality spectrum for analysis. Together, we evaluated visual territories aligned with these brand personalities and conducted a peer/competitor design review to identify what resonated most with Equity Fund.

Additionally, I co-facilitated a workshop on site structure. Partnering with a colleague, I helped sketch an initial site information architecture and developed wireframes for key high-level pages, ensuring they aligned with Equity Fund’s goals and vision.

The inspirations that resonated most with Equity Fund centered around a bold, trustworthy, and sophisticated aesthetic. They were particularly drawn to impactful, large-scale typography and the timeless appeal of classic magazine-style editorial layouts.

With Equity Fund’s feedback, the team developed two distinct design directions. One emphasized boldness and power, while the other leaned into the elegance of editorial design. After presenting both options, Equity Fund expressed a preference for elements from each, leading to a blended approach that incorporated the best of both worlds.

Together with a team member we conducted a site audit and explored new possibilities for an improved information architecture. We identified key landing pages and created some high-level wireframes.

The existing navigation and site structure proved to be confusing to users. Equity Fund’s user base expressed difficulty finding resources, grantee information, as well as understanding Equity Fund’s mission and work.

In order to address these issues we streamlined the navigation, added clear and brief messaging to the key pages which elegantly summarized their work, and used color and bold typography to highlight stats. The new design system proved to be quite an overhaul when compared to their existing website.

As part of the tech brief, we implemented WordPress as the CMS and adopted a modular, block-driven approach, leveraging WordPress’ built-in editorial tools. By developing custom blocks using the Gutenberg editor, we provided Equity Fund with significant flexibility in selecting the appropriate components for their content.

Our goal was to deliver a strong foundation through thoughtful design recommendations while ensuring Equity Fund had the flexibility to independently build and customize key pages as needed.

We successfully delivered a bespoke editor experience that enhanced WordPress’ native capabilities, offering both power and ease of use.